I've been banking on the Internet for a long time. Started with a nice app on Windows in around 1998 and I was hooked. Phone banking, as in using the keypad or a tone generator (or in recent times voice) that's always been a crazy idea IMHO. Slow and imprecise. Never got into that one. I would have got into other computing style ones, that is pre-internet, but I was a late starter. Didn't get my first networked computer until 1997, and the Internet was all the rage. But, back on topic, I love internet banking. So much better than going into a branch and wasting everyone's time, but I don't like the growing trend of not trusting computers and instead trusting.... phones. Meh.
Why trust phones more than computers? I don't have a huge problem with phones, but the concept that they are more secure than a PC bothers me. Phones are taken everywhere, can be lost easily, and are often more hackable than people realise. Especially the biometrics. But authenticators (which, to their credit, aren't always phones), custom apps and two-factor-SMS is seen as a smart idea to secure an account, when two-factor-EMail is not so common. I've been seeing some sites that completely ignore passwords now and rely on some form of two-factor exclusively. This starts bothering me a lot when I'm at home and I want to do some banking and I need to keep my phone handy, or worse still in a location that prohibits phones and then you need to do phone-based two factor authentication. At least for now I can sometimes remotely link my phone.
But I'm not liking this... too much tied up in a device that is locked to a company (Apple/Google/Microsoft/Whatever) who can at a whim close your account if you're deemed invalid. Scary stuff...
